1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing apparatus and a surveillance camera system. More specifically, the present invention relates to an image processing apparatus for processing a plurality of kinds of image signals output from a plurality of fixed cameras and multiplexed in a time-division manner, and a surveillance camera system utilizing the same.
2. Description of the Prior Art
In a surveillance camera system having a plurality of fixed surveillance cameras and capturing a plurality of image signals output from the plurality of fixed surveillance cameras in a time-division manner so as to record the captured image signals onto a recording medium, recently, a hard disk comes into wide use as a recording medium. In such the surveillance camera system, an image signal is recorded in a compressed state so as to store the image signal (image data) as large as possible on the hard disk. Furthermore, a compression ratio at a time of a compression process is adjusted such that a size (capacity) of a compressed image file obtained by the compression process falls within a certain range. Thus, the size of the compressed image file falls within a certain range, so that it is easy to deal with the compressed image file and to manage a capacity of the hard disk.
However, in such the surveillance camera system, respective surveillance cameras are placed at separate positions, and surveillance objects is apt to different depending on the respective surveillance cameras, and therefore, a following problem conventionally occurs. That is, as the surveillance objects are different depending on the surveillance cameras, the size of the image signals fetched from these surveillance cameras in a time-division manner is sequentially changed, and a compression ratio for compressing these image signals up to the above-described certain range of the size is also changed. However, there is a program that when the size of the image signal is sharply changed, the adjustment of the compression ratio cannot follow the change and therefore, it takes a long time to make the size of the compressed image file within the target range.